Can Canada do business with Saudi Arabia and still support human rights?

Ensaf Haidar has been trying to get her husband, Raif Badawi, freed from a Saudi prison. In December, the European Parliament bestowed the 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on Badawi in Strasbourg. Haidar accepted it on his behalf at the European Parliament.PATRICK HERTZOG / AFP/Getty Images

Sherbrooke, Que. – The last time Ensaf Haidar spoke to her husband, Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, it was for exactly three minutes.

Since Badawi was moved to a prison in Jeddah in December, Haidar cannot call him herself, or send him any photos or letters – he would only get them upon his release, in about 10 years. This time, Badawi was allowed just enough time to say hello to each of his three children, Najwa, 12, Doudi, 11, and Myriam, 8.

Haidar can’t say exactly when that was. She doesn’t like to count days; it makes time seem painfully long.

Photos of Badawi and the children line the walls of her comfortable home on a quiet street in Sherbrooke.

Across town, giant posters of Badawi cling to the facade of city hall, where a vigil for him takes place every Friday.

“I had so much hope when Mr. Trudeau was elected. It was like a door to freedom was opened for Raif,” says Ensaf Haidar, whose Sherbrooke home is filled with photos of her husband and kids.Pierre Obendrauf /
Montreal Gazette

She carries Badawi’s book of blog posts, with his piercing gaze on the cover, wherever she goes, from Los Angeles in January to Geneva this March, to receive another award in his name or press for his release.

And when she posts photos of herself on Instagram – here with Bono, there with Patti Smith – it’s as Badawi’s most tireless supporter.

A photo posted by Ensaf haidar (@miss9afi) on May 21, 2015 at 5:44pm PDT

But when Haidar looks at the calendar, she gets discouraged.

“Raif is not one to talk about himself and the conditions in prison or what he eats,” she says, through an interpreter. “But I know him well enough to hear in his voice how tired he is and how afflicted he is by the sense of injustice of being in prison for years just for expressing himself.”

For insulting Islam on his blog, Badawi was sentenced to 10 years, 1,000 lashes and a fine of $1 million Saudi riyals ($359,000) followed by a travel ban for another 10 years.

“He won’t see Najwa again until she is 32,” Haidar says. “He can’t sleep. He can’t think of anything else.”

It’s been a year since Badawi received the first 50 lashes in front of a mosque in Jeddah, his home town. Mercifully, the other weekly floggings have been suspended, for unknown reasons.

In that year, as Haidar and her children settled into Canada as political refugees, both the Quebec National Assembly and the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights unanimously passed motions calling on Saudi Arabia to release Badawi and permit him to reunite with his family in Canada.

But it’s also been a year since the federal government announced it had helped broker a deal to sell Saudi Arabia $15 billion in armoured vehicles – the biggest arms deal Canada has ever made.

At the time, the Harper government boasted of the 3,000 jobs it would support in southern Ontario over the next 14 years.

The Trudeau government, for its part, has pointed to contractual obligations. It will broker deals differently next time, but cancelling this one could hurt its reputation, it says.

Meanwhile, both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have been all but silent in their criticism of the kingdom.

While their foreign ministers have called for clemency for Badawi, each has refused to call into question the conviction itself or personally take his case to the King of Saudi Arabia.

Haidar and others suggest there’s a simple explanation for the deal going through while Badawi counts the days to the next possible flogging: Profit trumps human rights.

“In the beginning, I had a lot of hope because I didn’t think politics or trade would interfere with protecting my husband’s human rights, which have nothing to do with trade,” says Haidar, adding that Trudeau expressed great compassion for Badawi before he was elected. “But I’m starting to feel naïve. I’m starting to believe there is a link between this lucrative deal and my husband’s situation.”

As Trudeau and his minister develop their own foreign policy, the question is: Can Canada support human rights abroad while it promotes arms manufacturers at home?

***

I Black Daesh, white Daesh

The day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris – which Saudi Arabia called a cowardly terrorist attack – Badawi, 31, was publicly whipped in front of a mosque for having set up a website for public debate, which it said violates Islamic values and propagates liberal thought.

Flogging is a commonplace punishment in Saudi Arabia for a host of crimes, from possessing alcohol to being gay. Beheadings are usually carried out in public – and with a sword – for rape and murder, but also blasphemy and apostasy (the abandonment of Islam.)

Adultery is punishable by stoning.

Beheadings are on the increase in Saudi Arabia, especially since the Arab Spring swept the region, and a new law was enacted in 2014, which broadly defined terrorism – also punishable by death – to include criticizing the reigning House of Saud.

At least 157 people were executed in 2015 – a two-decade high – compared to 90 people in 2014.

Then, this past January, 47 convicted terrorists were executed in one day, including an outspoken Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, leading to demonstrations and riots in several countries across the Middle East.

Several constituents and organizations urged the Canadian government to intervene on al-Nimr’s behalf before he was executed, it has been revealed in emails obtained through the Access to Information Act. Their names were redacted when they were released. But officials at theCanadian embassy in Riyadh, while professing to monitor the situation closely, had advised the government not to take any further action.

If al-Nimr was indeed executed, they wrote, there might be protests that “could be contained by the strong Saudi presence.” In the worse-case scenario, oil production would be “modestly impacted.”

The striking similarities between ISIS and Saudi Arabia, both of which follow and foster a strict version of Islam called Wahhabism, have not gone unnoticed.

Writing in the New York Times in November, Kamel Daoud, a columnist with Algeria’s Quotidien d’Oran, spoke of “black Daesh” (ISIS) and “white Daesh” (Saudi Arabia):

“The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things.”

To be sure, Saudi Arabia remains one of the West’s staunchest allies against terrorism and has pledged ground troops in the war against ISIS.

But it has also long been accused of funding radical Salafist or Wahhabist groups in Syria and elsewhere, as well as schools and mosques around the world that have become fertile ground for ISIS recruitment.

What differentiates the two, Daoud continued, are Western countries’ attitudes toward them. He might have added their willingness to trade.

Indeed, we are at war with ISIS, and yet as Justin Trudeau came to power in November, federal advisers urged him to strengthen economic ties with the kingdom.

“In terms of crime and punishment, (ISIS and Saudi Arabia) prescribe nearly identical punishment for a host of crimes,” says former MP and justice minister Irwin Cotler, who represents Badawi on the international stage. “When it comes to ISIS, we understand why not only do we not enter into an arms deal with them, but we are at war with them. Yet with Saudi Arabia, we sanitize what is happening there so the country with one of the worst human-rights records is a beneficiary of an arms sale that violates our own regulations.”

Cotler was referring to Canadian export controls that prohibit the selling of arms to countries that demonstrate “a persistent pattern” of human-rights violations. For an export permit to be issued, the government must be convinced the importing country will not use the weapons against civilians.

The sale of armoured vehicles, on which medium- to high-powered cannons can be mounted, was made to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which deals with internal threats to the country.

But if Canada did conduct an assessment of the human-rights situation in Saudi Arabia, it has refused to produce it, despite repeated requests from reporters.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion refused a request for an interview in February, and his department spokespeople would only say they are finalizing the 2015 human-rights report on Saudi Arabia, and will look into which report was used to justify the deal.

Stéphane Dion favours “engagement” versus isolation as a way to promote positive change in countries like Iran, for instance.

As reported by the Globe and Mail, when Ken Rubin, an access-to-information researcher, asked Foreign Affairs to provide any reports it had prepared on human rights in Saudi Arabia for 2013 and 2014, the department said it couldn’t find any such records.

In the meantime, however, Dion has spoken about his emerging foreign policy toward authoritarian regimes, and the importance of “engagement” versus isolation as a way to promote positive change in countries like Iran, for instance.

“The only thing accomplished (through) the old way (of doing things) is that Bombardier may be out and Airbus is in,” Dion said, in a speech in Ottawa on Jan. 26. “Result: Ontario and Quebec lose. Our oil and gas sector may be out. Result: Alberta loses.”

Trade, on the other hand, can “open the door to tough conversations in other areas,” Dion said – like freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Peter Sutherland was an ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1996, and is now CEO of the Canada Arab Business Council. He says the same holds true for the Gulf kingdom.

His members represent hundreds of companies doing business in Saudi Arabia, and they, too, are concerned about the human-rights situation in the country, he says.

“But the way to deal with that is through engagement. There are some very sophisticated Saudis who were educated in the West and feel the same way we do. But to turn the society around, given the strength of the religious authorities, takes time. And I don’t think you advance the cause by walking away.”

What has engagement with Saudi Arabia achieved for Badawi or human rights in general? Dion and his spokespeople could not say.

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard supported Haidar’s efforts a year ago at the Quebec legislature.Jacques Boissinot /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Dion has said he raised Badawi’s case with his Saudi counterpart in Ottawa, just as John Baird did when he was foreign affairs minister.

But he has refused to confer on Badawi either Canadian citizenship or permanent residence, which both Haidar and Cotler feel would allow Canada to be more assertive on Badawi’s behalf.

“Our main goal is to help obtain the freedom of Mr. Badawi, and it would not be useful to our ongoing efforts to give him Canadian citizenship or permanent residency,” said spokesperson Diana Khaddaj.

Cotler, who has advocated on behalf of other prisoners of conscience, including Nelson Mandela and Natan Sharansky, who was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, suggests that talks at the highest level – between Trudeau and King Salman – could also be effective. But Trudeau has told reporters he has no intention of taking Badawi’s case directly to the king.

In December, elections in Saudi Arabia did for the first time allow women both to vote and to present themselves as candidates. Nineteen women were elected to office.

But women of all ages are still required to have a male guardian at all times – even if it’s their son – and are still not allowed to drive, or even protest the fact they can’t drive, without fear of arrest.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has become the biggest buyer of weapons in the world, increasing its purchases by 17 per cent in 2014.

At the end of January, a United Nations report found that a Saudi-led coalition was responsible for 60 per cent of the civilian casualties in Yemen, where it has led a bombing campaign to put down a Houthi insurgency since last March – using some of those foreign-made planes and other weaponry, including what appear to be U.S. made cluster bombs.

Anna Viden, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in U.S.-Saudi relations, says the kind of weak engagement the U.S. and Canada have practised — with mild criticism and no strings attached — simply doesn’t work.

“They are aware of human-rights issues, but they believe that if they maintain contacts over time, there will be change,” Viden said. “But that has not happened. In my opinion it’s completely bogus. National security and economic interests are just so much bigger, and that’s how our governments function these days.”

It is clear what engagement has brought us: great economic benefits.

II “Arming the executioner”

Trade between Canada and Saudi Arabia is by no means confined to arms.

The Export Development Corporation has helped 184 Canadian companies do business with Saudi Arabia, where Canada exports more than $2.2 billion in merchandise annually, in construction and infrastructure, mining, transportation and oil and gas, among other sectors.

It all amounts to peanuts, however, compared with the deal signed with General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ont., to sell almost $15 billion in light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

That deal alone accounted for 95 per cent of Canadian military exports in 2013-2014.

Cesar Jaramillo of Project Ploughshares, which tracks military exports, said there have been other arms deals with Saudi Arabia, but the magnitude of this agreement, at a time where human-rights abuses in the country are front-page news around the world, has raised many red flags.

“How bizarre that within two days of the government condemning the (47) executions in January, it confirmed plans to arm the executioner,” Jaramillo said.

If Saudi Arabia doesn’t fit the description of “persistent human-rights abuses” – and fails the export controls – who does? he asks.

“No one wants to be accused of axing 3,000 jobs,” Jaramillo said as a way of explaining why even labour unions, historically staunch defenders of human rights, chose not to challenge the arms agreement. “It’s a legitimate pursuit of any government to seek job creation. But if that’s the sole criterion, why shouldn’t we sell weapons to ISIS or North Korea or the drug cartels? Saudi Arabia sets the bar very low.”

Jaramillo said Canada’s stance on Saudi Arabia is disingenuous. At the very least, Canadians should be shown the deal – and the human-rights assessment – to decide for themselves whether it should be cancelled.

“It may be as a nation we’re comfortable selling arms to Saudi Arabia. We may consider a certain number of beheadings are a fair price to pay for employment in Southwestern Ontario. What I have a problem with is the sanctimonious hypocrisy of claiming human rights are a paramount objective, then selling weapons to one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.”

There’s a social illusion of Canada being a strong human-rights promoter, Jaramillo said, “but the measure of this is not the collective idea we have of ourselves or the strength of export controls on paper, but the reality on the ground. Someone’s daughter or sister or uncle or aunt is going to be beheaded or flogged for blogging. That’s what should be considered.”

Canada is not alone: France, which arguably has suffered the most among Western countries from Islamist extremism many believe is fostered in and by Saudi Arabia, is nevertheless doing brisk trade with the kingdom. Last October, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls went on a trade summit to Saudi Arabia to furnish it with helicopters, ships, and satellite surveillance systems.

The United Nations, for its part, in September appointed Saudi Arabia to chair an influential United Nations panel on human rights.

The one Western country to stand up to Saudi Arabia, albeit briefly, was Sweden – and it paid the price.

When Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom spoke out publicly about the abuse of dissidents in Saudi Arabia last spring, the Saudis blocked her from speaking in front of the Arab League, withdrew their ambassador to Sweden and suspended the issue of business visas to all Swedes. The Swedish government in turn cancelled a $1-billion arms agreement with Saudi Arabia, inciting panic in the defence industry.

All was set right, however, when the Swedish king apologized to the Saudi king on Wallstrom’s behalf.

Some believe Canada might also have suffered the consequences of offending the Saudis on a smaller scale when Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird held a meeting with Israeli officials in East Jerusalem, considered Palestinian territory by the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia promptly and without explanation cancelled a trade summit in Toronto of the Canada-Saudi Joint Economic Commission in 2013. The summit was never rescheduled.

***

III Toward real engagement

Cesar Jaramillo and Irwin Cotler say the Trudeau government is at a crossroads in its stance on human rights. On the one hand, part of Dion’s mandate is to bring Canada into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which came into force in December 2014.

Under the former Conservative government, Canada was the only NATO country not to sign on to the treaty, which regulates trade in conventional weapons, joining a handful of outlier nations like South Sudan, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, the list of countries Canada will now sell automatic firearms to has tripled from 13 in 1991 to 39 in 2015. The only Middle Eastern country on the list is Saudi Arabia.

Jaramillo said now’s the time for the prime minister to take a principled stand and either cancel the arms contract with Saudi Arabia or renegotiate it, with human-rights provisions included. The questions won’t go away, he said.

“(Trudeau) will face criticism, whatever he does. He should not see this as a challenge or hurdle, but as an opportunity to cement his legacy and show his true colours.”

In the wake of the mass executions in Saudi Arabia, it appears other countries, including Germany and Britain, are reconsidering their arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The German vice-chancellor has blocked an agreement to build a German arms factory in Saudi Arabia, for example.

At the end of February, the European Union parliament voted for an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia, though it didn’t compel member states to stop arms sales to the country.

Anna Viden said by working together and refusing to sign deals without conditions for change, progressive countries can advance human rights in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

“There has to be some kind of consensus to continue to work with Saudi Arabia but show with our actions that we don’t accept these massive human-rights violations anymore. It would also send a different kind of message to people in the region that we live as we preach.”

In the conflict between interests and values, she said, interests have always won out.

Cotler, who worked with Stéphane Dion in Paul Martin’s government and considers him a friend, wants the government to make human rights a centrepiece of its new foreign policy.

“Where human rights will stand with the new government has not been worked out,” said Cotler, who is now the head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal. “I’m hoping we will send a clear signal that we regard human rights as a signature of foreign policy. We will not be indulging human-rights violators and in fact rearming them.”

In the meantime, Cotler said in his experience with prisoners of conscience, whenever they have a spouse fighting for their release, their chances of success are that much greater. Think Winnie Mandela and Avital Sharansky.

Back in Sherbrooke, Haidar is still hoping Trudeau will step in to help release her husband before her children forget what it was like to spend time with him.

Haidar is about to release her own book of memoirs this month – working title: The Love of My Life.Pierre Obendrauf /
Montreal Gazette

She left Saudi Arabia in 2011, when a fatwa was issued against Badawi. Badawi told her to leave with the children, reassuring her that he would join them in a matter of weeks.

As she prepares to release her own book of memoirs this month – working title: The Love of My Life – she is trying to ignore persistent rumours that Badawi could be tried again for apostasy, which carries the death penalty.

“I had so much hope when Mr. Trudeau was elected. It was like a door to freedom was opened for Raif,” says Haidar, who is extremely grateful to Canada for accepting her as a refugee. “Canada is a strong country, and the government can help me bring Raif back here. That’s what I want… It’s not up to me to dictate foreign policy. But foreign policy shouldn’t affect how the government protects human rights and freedoms… Raif has been in prison too long.”

***

Canada’s lucrative ties to Saudi Arabia

Canada exports more than $1.2 billion in merchandise to Saudi Arabia every year, in construction and infrastructure, mining, transportation and oil and gas, among other sectors. That doesn’t include our trade in services, which involves some of Quebec’s heaviest hitters.

Quebec-based Bombardier, for example, recently won a $514 million contract to help deliver technology for a transit system in Saudi Arabia, including 47 two-car driverless métro trains.

SNC-Lavalin, for its part, boasts of a 24-year relationship with Saudi Aramco, providing engineering services for its oil and gas facilities. It recently won two contracts worth a combined $71 million, and its consortium with a Saudi firm has increased its staff from 350 in 2012 to 800 in 2015.

Then there’s education. There are 16,000 Saudi students in Canada – all paying foreign-student fees and putting $2 billion into the economy. There are 4,000 Canadian-trained doctors in Saudi Arabia.

Two publicly subsidized Ontario colleges – Niagara and Algonquin – have been operating male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia, a major source of embarrassment to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, a former education minister and staunch feminist. A third, Centennial College, has an apprenticeship training contract in the Gulf country.

Meanwhile, InterHealth Canada, based in Toronto, signed lucrative contracts in 2012 and 2013 to develop and manage two health facilities with the King Saud University Endowment and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, a doctor by training, co-founded the Dhahran Department of Neurosurgery, Saudi Arabia, where he worked from 1992 to 1996.

The deal signed with General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ont., to sell almost $15 billion in light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia accounted for 95 per cent of Canadian military exports in 2013-2014. It will add more than $1 billion to the tally every year for 14 years.

***

Canadians caught in Saudi Arabia:
William Sampson and Nathalie Morin

Before Raif Badawi’s case caught the world’s attention, two Canadians found themselves on the wrong side of Saudi law, and their families asked the Canadian government to intervene.

William Sampson

William Sampson was a dual British-Canadian citizen who was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and charged with terrorism, espionage and murder. Sentenced to death by beheading, he spent two years and seven months in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured before being released and allowed to leave Saudi Arabia in August 2003. No evidence ever linked him to the car bombings that claimed the life of another expat. His confession was obtained under torture.

William Sampson spent two years and seven months in a Saudi jail, where he was tortured, before being released in 2003. He’s shown in a television broadcast released by the Saudi Press Agency.- /
AFP

Though the Canadian government insisted it had used back channels and diplomacy to help secure his release, Sampson himself repeatedly criticized the Canadian government for never questioning his guilt, and always asking him about his prison conditions in front of his torturers.

Sampson said he repeatedly informed Canadian diplomats and doctors that he was being tortured, but to no avail. According to Amnesty International, Canadian officials never investigated the allegations of torture. Sampson died in Britain in 2012, at the age of 52.

Nathalie Morin

Quebecer Nathalie Morin was 21 when she went to live in Saudi Arabia in 2005 with her three-year-old son and his Saudi father, who had been a student at Concordia University. Since then, she has had three other children, but has been held in a sort of captivity in the kingdom, with first the father of her children and then the government refusing to issue the children passports so they can leave the country.

Montrealer Nathalie Morin has been trying to leave Saudi Arabia for years, but she can’t get passports for her and her kids.Montreal Gazette files

Morin’s mother, Johanne Durocher, launched a campaign in 2008 to draw attention to her daughter’s plight and force the federal government to intervene, but despite petitions and demonstrations, Morin is still stuck.

In 2013, when it appeared her husband had locked her in the house, with no food for the family, two prominent female Saudi activists went to bring her provisions and were subsequently arrested and charged with inciting a wife against her husband.

In 2014, Morin told La Presse that her husband had finally agreed to allow the children to leave as long as Canada gave him a visa so he could go with them. The Canadian government did so, but the Saudi government still did not issue passports.

“Her situation has improved, in the sense that she now receives an income directly from the Saudi government, or from charity in the street,” Durocher said in February, adding she longs to see her daughter and grandchildren.

Durocher has stopped campaigning for her daughter, however, fearing it could make things worse for Morin. But the Canadian government could do more, she said. She signed a petition for the release of Raif Badawi last year.

“But before they help a Saudi citizen,” she told the Montreal Gazette, “the government should be working harder for Canadian citizens, like Nathalie Morin and her four Canadian children.”

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